


In an Artist's Studio

by NotQuiteHydePark



Category: Marvel 616, New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-11-04 09:54:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17896280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotQuiteHydePark/pseuds/NotQuiteHydePark
Summary: What's the secret of Warbird's latest painting?





	In an Artist's Studio

**Author's Note:**

> Set during Wolverine and the X-Men, vol. 1, after Battle of the Atom.

Probably only Emma and Hank have seen as much art as Warbird at this point: the minute she realized she could stay on Earth and teach at the school without having to link herself always to Kubark’s side, she planned a three-week trip around the world, to what she thought were the world’s great museums, although she only got to about a third of them. (The Tate, in London, reminded Ava’dara very unpleasantly of Shi’ar training quarters; there was one in Denmark, and another in Shanghai, that she loved.)

The rest of her art education took place in the studio, in the Jean Grey School, at all hours, with multiple screens open to visually splendid websites, as well as multiple digital brushes and pens, tubes of oil paint, tempera washes. When Warbird wasn’t eating or sleeping or having confused conversations with would-be protégés, she was in here, making Renaissance-style portrait miniatures, full-color mini-comics, series on paper, and full-dress exhibition canvases, and imitating—or really just learning from—Earth artists all over the stylistic, and the literal map. 

Emma hasn’t seen much of that art—it’s not like she spends much time at the Jean Grey School these days—but Hank, who still has a room at the school, has seen most of it. He wishes he could see it all. Ava’dara has taken in, and spoken about, and imitated, everyone on her growing list of favorites, even the artists who might seem absolutely incompatible with one another—Giotto, Della Francesca, Caravaggio, Gentileschi, Caspar David Friedrich, Frankenthaler, Sienkiewicz, Smith, Davis, Michi, Shelby, Bourgeois, Kentridge, and a Thai engraver whose name Hank (not a speaker of Thai, alas) can’t bring to mind….

And that’s why there’s a thoughtful, blue, furry mutant with a monocle hanging from the ceiling, looking upside down, and then (he dismounts) right side up at Ava’dara’s latest canvas, and one of her biggest: it’s a group portrait, almost like what in the sequential art world (so Hank has learned) gets referred to as a splash page.

There’s Jean herself, in the green, glossy Phoenix outfit from long ago, the one she wore when she first revealed herself as the Phoenix, before the terrifying tragedy of the dark red costume and the world she destroyed. She’s ascending, flying, legs together, arms outstretched towards the viewer. She’s surrounded by fire and light, the crosses and X’s of faraway stars in her red-orange hair. Ava’dara might not know that this Phoenix was not really Jean, just a version of Jean with all Jean’s memories, and she’s certainly heard the story of how Dark Phoenix became a danger to everything, to everyone, the stories of what the Shi’ar had to step in and do; she must (Hank conjectures) have wanted to depict this woman, this student, so revered here, such an icon, after her first death, before everything that went wrong. 

There’s Rachel Summers, seated in the foreground, closest to us; she looks as if she were part of a conversation, listening to the viewer and then instructing, saying perhaps (Warbird once overheard Rachel say this) “Go find what I never had.” She’s in street clothes: a teal jacket with a jaunty lapel and pockets down the front, beige jeans with tan piping, a top whose broad collar shows off her collarbone. She has uncommonly clear skin, with none of the markings that sometimes show through on a bad day. There’s a bracelet with small metal spikes on her left wrist, and shiny obsidian earrings, visible just under her straight hair, cut asymmetrically. 

Because Jean and Rachel have the same skin and hair color, the difference in style between the two portraits really pops: Jean as Phoenix is, well, astonishing, not exactly three-dimensional, larger than life, the cosmic flames around her almost abstract, the incarnation of an optimism Warbird wants to get back. (It’s a bit like Michi, Hank thinks. And a bit Frankenthalerish.) 

Rachel, however, is a creature of hard-won realism, someone who escaped from a bad fantasy, not someone who came from a good one: she looks like a former tough kid, a tough adult, but not like someone who came from a dystopia, not like someone who has been through so much; she looks like someone who could lead, not a normal life, but one she chose. (John Singer Sargent, Hank thinks. But modern dress.)

Off to the left—is he carrying a tree trunk? a piece of furniture? he’s in metal form, and is using his strength for something, and he looks happy to help out—there’s Piotr. He’s half in shadow, almost like you had to be looking for him to see his importance, with a few glints off the organic steel. It’s too much of a stretch to imagine him happy, but Warbird has at least made him look satisfied; whatever he’s bringing us, whatever he’s giving us, it’s something we could use, or something we want.

Behind Rachel, not especially far from Colossus, there’s Kitty; she looks relieved to be tangible, happy not to be in charge. She’s wearing—Ava’dara must have found it in somebody’s image files; she’s certainly never seen it—her Excalibur costume, with its blue gloves, its jacket and its sash, impractical for almost any other power set; there’s no visible cause for her happiness—it is just is.

Far off, overhead, that must be Warren: the sun’s at his back, so he’s mostly a filled-in outline, but his wings are spread, majestically, as if he had recently taken off. (If he spent more time around Warren, Hank thinks, he’d try to encourage Warren to fly more often, to get some time to himself more often, and delegate more authority to write checks.)

On the roof of what might be a three-story building, half-obscured by a green-and-white tree in bloom, is a figure who must be Xi’an, holding hands with two kids: they’re watching the so-far-benevolent Phoenix flare, or maybe just looking out over the park on a sunny day. There's something lovely-- something cute about the three of them; Louise Bourgeois for the building, Hank thinks, and maybe a bit of Shelby for the kids.

Behind Kitty, there’s Illyana, with no trace of the Darkchylde: a blond girl in silver armor, looking radiantly fierce, and holding a sword. Every part of her except for her face is a light source. She is defending somebody from something. That’s what makes her happiest, now that she’s here.

Doug Ramsey is seated beside Rachel, reading a large book—no, reading two books at once; they’re on a card table, and he’s got a device of some sort in his other hand. The device has two big blinking black and white eyes. The device is smiling. The device is Warlock. Doug’s posture suggests the kind of comfort you get when you’re in a café and lost in a book, the kind of comfort familiar to Hank from his hours of reading novels upside-down. 

But Hank is always happy to be interrupted, greet people, impress them, get what he wants from them, and then go back to reading Lady Murasaki or George Eliot or Husserl; Doug doesn’t like interruptions, or eye contact, or too many stimuli at once, and this version of Doug has what Doug wants.

Beside Doug on that table, beside his books, is Magneto’s helmet, the white one he wore on Utopia. It’s as if they had a souvenir.

And there, in a dormer window behind the rest of them (except for Angel) is Warbird herself, looking down intensely at Rachel, Kitty, Piotr, Illyana, Doug and even the incongruously expressionist Jean. She’s holding a sketchpad. She’s making notes. She’s put herself into the painting, as the artist who’s making notes for a future painting. She’s shown that the life she depicts here is going to go on, because she’s going to go on depicting it. She’s the artist who records it. Or at least an artist who records it.

But there’s something else, Hank thinks. Some other reason she’s put herself into this picture, this picture that takes up most of one wall in Ava’dara’s big studio. What is she doing in this particular company? What does she have in common with this particular set of mutant heroes (and maybe an anti-hero)? Especially if the set includes (Hank is really surprised to see him) Quentin Quire, vaguely sketched, behind a house, but unmistakable with his pink hair, playing some form of telekinetic badminton (the birdie is there, too, a single V-shaped brushstroke)?

What do Quentin, Piotr, Doug (or Douglock), Rachel, Jean, Illyana, Xi’an, Erik, and Warren have in common? What do they share that makes them belong in one portrait, what thing that (say) Scott, Bobby, Rogue, and Jubilee, and Hank himself, do not share with any of them? And why would Warbird put herself there too?

Ava’dara walks into her studio; she moves quietly when she wants, but she’s wearing her chunky casual boots, and Hank hears her before he sees her. She waves and narrows her eyes a bit, taking in Hank taking in her latest, and maybe her largest, work. She’s wondering, Hank thinks, whether he understands it. And then he understands it.

Kitty in space, intangible, thought lost forever…. Warren after the plane exploded, when he was Death, like something out of Webster, a revenge figure on Team Apocalypse coming back from beyond the grave, and then coming back to his senses during a fight…. Magneto in space, too… Piotr, reconstructed by alien tech… Xi’an and the Shadow King… Quentin the erstwhile Phoenix host whose dangerous consciousness used to be virtually dead, kept in a box… Douglas after Necrosha…. and Jean and Rachel, of course… and Illyana, of course…

All these mutants had been dead, or lost forever and treated as if they were dead, and then literally or virtually resurrected. These happy X-Men were happy to be back on Earth, happy to have bodies and conversations and to be moving through this world again. They’d been resurrected; they knew what they had to lose.

But why was Warbird there? “I get it,” Hank says. “I am so happy to see it. It’s a picture of resurrections.” He can’t help himself; he’s quoting a favorite poem, a poem about accepting resurrections, accepting an offer of help: “Do not by hanging down break from the hand/Which as it riseth raiseth thee.” But then he stops. He’s about to ask Warbird "Why did you put yourself there?” She's never been dead, as far as he knows, or even taken for lost, given up for dead.

But Warbird is staring back at him. He’s figured it out. Her presence here, as a teacher allowed to make art, her residence in a place that gives her time and materials and permission and the security to paint and draw and make what she wants to see: that in itself is a kind of resurrection. She was very good at being Warbird (sometimes her hand drifts to her energy sword; she’s always prepared to join a fight). But the job was killing her, had almost killed her, inside. Especially after her history. Being here, in this community, as violent as it sometimes had to be, was a kind of resurrection in itself. Here Ava’dara could make art, and have a new life.

The Warbird in the painting had eyes you could follow, even though she wasn’t seen from close up: she seemed to be looking across the park at Xi’an, and then at Kitty, and then back out at you. It’s as if she were asking permission for something—no, Hank thinks, as if permission were granted. Her new life was there.

Her new life is here. Ava’dara asks Hank if he’s had breakfast yet; there are scones, she says, and hot tea. She’s not inviting him to join her; she’s asking, politely, for him to leave, so that she can have her time to draw, before the rest of the day begins.

Hank smiles, satisfied, hoping he’s shown how much he’s happy to see her near-finished work, and then bounds out of her studio and down the stairs.

**Author's Note:**

> Hank is quoting this poem: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/herbert/dawning.htm  
> You can view more of Michi's art at http://michiums.tictail.com and more of Shelby's at http://shelbywolf.tumblr.com; the 616 versions of these artists, of course, depict scenes and people who exist in their world, just as portrait and history painters do in ours.


End file.
